What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.
~Richard Bach
Friday I took the kids to my Mom's house out in the country to take close ups
of insects and flowers. There was this beautiful yellow butterfly
that was so focused on the butterfly bush, that it didn't mind
my giant lens.
Most of these pictures were taken at F2.8 1/400 ISO 200
All handheld and cropped
All handheld and cropped
F4 1/600 ISO 200
Wow! Those are gorgeous! I love the beautiful colors. Great captures, Lori! I want to try that lens now too!
ReplyDeleteThank you Alea! I still can't get a sharp image so I wasn't very happy with the butterfly pics. (and he was the perfect model darn it!) Parts of the wing were in focus and others were not. Weird because I wasn't close to it, but I was wide open because I wanted a faster shutter speed. Those pics are all cropped down.
ReplyDeleteYesterday I finally changed my focus points to only the center one and switched to AI servo. I did some flowers since the change but they didn't come out any better.
I bought a new tripod to see if that improves my sharpness since I suspect it's movement on my part. But I really want to shoot handheld so hopefully I can figure it out. If that doesn't work then I will take my camera in and have it checked out. My lenses are brand new and one of them even was serviced recently.
I can't post in RAW yet because I don't have the software to convert the files. Do you use Photoshop for that?
Using F2.8 means that you will have a razor thin plane of focus. Which means the butterfly is actually a tricky subject because the wings aren't always perfectly flat and it has a lot of little parts that are in different planes. Also, you may want to increase your ISO a little which will give you a little more wiggle room with your shutter speeds and apertures. The 5D should be able to handle 400 ISO in good outdoor light without noticeable noise. If you stop it down a bit you will also get a larger depth of field which means that more of the details will be in within the range of focus.
ReplyDeleteI also found a tutorial on focus and sharpness, here's the link:
http://photo.tutsplus.com/tutorials/shooting/achieving-better-focus-and-sharpness-in-your-images/
You might find something useful there even though you might already know most of the info.
Did you see the link I put on my blog for Canon's Digital Photo Professional software for viewing/converting the RAW files? I do have CS5 too, which uses Adobe Camera Raw to process and edit the files. But DPP is what I use to be able to view my uploaded RAW files.
That makes sense and helps a lot. Thank you for the link too. I went to upload the software but I could only find the upgrades to it. It said I needed to have the original one. I searched but couldn't find the non upgraded version. I will keep looking though. Thanks Alea!
ReplyDeleteOh sorry about that! I just did a quick search on E-bay and found a few copies of Digital Photo Professional, some saying they are brand-new for like $21.00.
ReplyDeleteYou're going to have to teach me how to use my camera. I've been so lazy that it's still in auto mode.
ReplyDelete